Security systems offer a degree of security for residential sites and for office, business, or industrial applications. Typically, a security device monitoring a protected area, such as a sensor or a camera, is provided as part of a security system for detecting the occurrence of various alerting events, such as a breach of the protected area, a fire condition, or other types of condition, and generating alarm signals or data indicative of the events. The signals or data are transmitted through wire or wireless connections to a security control panel configured for processing the alarm signals or data from the security device and implementing other functionalities based on the processed results of the alarm signals or data, such as arming the system, disarming the system, providing system status and generating alerting messages indicative of the events, coordinating the operations of different functional modules of the system, and so on.
In addition, a central monitoring station may be provided to communicate with the security control panel for receiving, routing and sending the messages generated by the control panel to the terminal devices of the users of the security system, notifying them the occurrence of alerting events. An example of the security system is disclosed in the commonly assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/252,667. Accordingly, the entirety of the U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/252,667 is incorporated herein by reference.
Generally, users expect events notifications of not only pure text but also multimedia information, such as pictures, audio clips and video clips. However, in the event that a large file, such as a video clip captured by a camera, needs to be transferred in the form of a message to the users of the security system, the file has to be transferred to the security control panel and subsequently processed by the security control panel to generate an alert message and further send the message to the central station. Thus, it is required that the security control panel be equipped with a memory of sufficient capacity to store the file and a microprocessor of high performance, which in turn increases the overall cost of the security system. Specifically, compared to pure text files, the multimedia files including video clips and/or audio clips require much larger storing capacities and higher information processing capacities of the security control panel.
In addition, the traditional event reporting scheme involves data/files transportation from the security device to the security control panel, which increases the communication burden of the whole system and incurs a long data transferring time.
Thus, it is desirable to have a system and method for reporting alert events to the users of the system efficiently, without demanding high performance hardware of the system.